Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi, Cervantes Prize 2021

The Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi is the winner this year of the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious of the letters in Castilian, announced this Wednesday in Madrid the Minister of Culture of Spain, Miquel Iceta.

“The jury of the Miguel de Cervantes prize for literature in the Spanish language, corresponding to 2021, has decided to grant this award to the writer Cristina Peri Rossi,” said the minister at a press conference when reading the ruling.

Peri Rossi was born in Montevideo in 1941 and in 1972 he had to leave the country due to the dictatorship, and most of the time that has elapsed since then has lived in Barcelona.

To his credit, he has almost twenty books of poetry, fifteen short stories, and five novels, the last of them “Everything I couldn’t say to you” (2017).

His first award, the Arca Youth Prize, he received in 1968 in his country, and since then he has won the Rafael Alberti International Poetry Prize (2000), the Don Quijote Poetry Prize or the José Donoso Ibero-American Literature Prize. (2019), a list crowned by this Cervantes Award.